It seems a good day to ask this question: What the heck does it take to fire a federal official?

If you’re James Comey, all you have to do is open an investigation into the president’s pals and wham-o. You're out the door.

But if you’re a senior executive with the Department of Veterans Affairs, you get plenty of second chances.

Which is far more than some of America's sick and dying veterans have gotten.

And so comes the infuriating day we knew was coming.

A federal appellate court has overturned the firing of Sharon Helman, who presided over a Phoenix VA Health Care System that left veterans waiting for weeks or even months for care while phony records were kept to show the agency was meeting its wait-time goals.

The woman who was convicted of criminal misconduct unrelated to the wait-time scandal --whose leadership of the Phoenix VA earned her the title "felon" -- gets to make her case (again, that is) for why she deserves to get her job back.

This, after the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit this week ruled that it wasn’t right to give Helman the old heave-ho without more chances to make her case for why she deserved to keep her job.

Apparently, it wasn’t enough that Helman was fired by the VA both as a result of the scandal and for taking $50,000 in gifts – including an $11,000 Disneyland trip for her family – from a lobbyist pal who was involved in seeking VA contracts.

It wasn’t enough that her firing was upheld by an administrative judge. (The administrative judge actually reversed her firing for lack of oversight at the Phoenix VA but upheld her dismissal for conduct unbecoming a senior executive and failure to report gifts.)

Wasn't enough even that she has since then pleaded guilty in federal court to filing a false financial disclosure that failed to list more than $50,000 in gifts she had received from a lobbyist.

The Court of the Appeals for the Federal Circuit this week ruled that Helman should have been able to appeal her firing once again, this time to the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board.

That board refused to hear her appeal last year, based upon the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act, which was passed by Congress in the wake of the VA scandal expressly to allow the VA to get rid of the system's leaches with a minimal amount of bloody residue.

But no.

The appellate panel sided with Helman, saying the expedited appeals process violated her constitutional right to appeal.

This is Helman's second major victory in her crusade to suck up whateever she can get out of the federal system.

In 2014, after the VA scandal broke and Helman was fired, VA officials tried to take back a $8,495 performance bonus from Helman. The VA Office of the Inspector General had concluded that she knew of falsified statistics and scored bonuses based on performance evaluations touting those numbers.

She appealed, naturally, and an administrative law judge sided with her -- ruling that the VA didn’t produce any evidence to prove that it didn’t mean to give her a bonus for that great job she was doing. You know, at the time wait times were being falsified in her agency and veterans were sick and even dying.